Morning journal and courier., 1887-08-19
swINBURNE,S PHILIPPEC.
Extracts From His Late.Day Renu,
cfatEon of Walt Whitman.

Extracts From HIS Late.Day Renun-
cIatEon of walt Whitman.
From the Fortaightly Reviewl
The remarkable American rhapsodist who
has inoculated certain number of English
readers and writers with the singular form
of ethical and aesthetic rabies for which his
name supplies the proper medical term of
definition is usually regarded by others than
Whitmaniacs as simply blatant quack-a
vehement and emphatic Ounce, of incompar-
able vanity and volubility, inconceivable
pretensions and Incompetence.
That such is by means altogether my
own view I need scarcely take the trouble to
protest. Walt Whitman has written some
pages to which l have before now given
praise enough to exonerate me, l should pre-
sumo, from any charge of prejudice or pre-
possession against writer whose claims to
occasional notice and occasional respect no
man can be less desirous to dispute than l
am. The unhealthily demonstra-
tive and obtrusive animalism of the Whit
maniad is as unnatural, as incompatible
with the wholesome instincts of human
passion, as even the filthy and inhuman as
ceticism of SIS. Macarius and Simeon Sty-
lites. If anything can justify the serious
and deliberate dismay of merely physical
emotion in literature or in art, it must be
one of two things; intense depth of feeling
expressed with inspired perfection of sim
plicity, with divine sublimity of fascination,
as by Sappho; or transcendent supremacy of
actual and irresistible beauty in such revela~
ton of naked nature as was possible in Ti-
tian But Mr.. Whitman's Eve is drunken
apple-woman, indecently sprawling in the
slush and garbage of the gutter amid the
rotten refuse of her overturned fruit stand;
but Mr. Whitman's Venus is Hottentot
wench under the influence of cantharides
and adulterated rum. Cotytto herself would
repudiate the ministration of such priestesses
as these. His sympathies, l Ie-
peat, are usually generous, his views of life
are occasionally just, and his views of death
are invariably noble In other words, he
generally means well, having good stock on
hand of honest emotion; he sometimes sees
we'll having natural sensibility to such as
poets of nature as appeal to an eye rather
quick than penetrating; he seldom writes
well, being cabined, cribbed, confined,
bounden to the limits of thoroughly un-
natural, initiative, histrionic and affected
style. But there is thrilling and fiery force
in his finest bursts of gusty rhetoric which
makes us wonder whether with little more
sense and a good deal more cultivation he
might not have made a noticeable orator.
AS poet, no amount of improvement that
self-knowledge and self-culture might have
brought to bear upon such exceptionally raw
than station to which his homely and man
ly patriotism would be the best claim that
could be preferred for him; seat beside
such writers as Ebenezer Elliott-or possibly
little higher, on such an elevation as might
be occupied by poet whom careful training
had reared and mstured into rather inferi-
or kind of Southey.
But to fit himself for such promotion he
would have, in the first place, to resign all
claim to the laurels of Gotham, with which
the critical cages of that famous borough
have bedecked his unbashful brows; he
would have to recognize that he is no more,
in the proper sense of the word, poet, than
Communalists or Dissolutionists are, in any
sense of the word, Republicans; that he has
exactly as much claim to a place beside
Dante as any Vermersen or Vermorei, or
other verminous and murdeIous muckworm
of the Partisan Commune to place beside
Mazzini in other words, that the informing
principle of his work is not so much the ne
cation as the contradiction of the creative
principle of poetry. And this it is not to be
expected that such man should bring him
self to believe, as long as he hears himself
! proclaimed the inheritor of seat assigned